To add to my analysis of the final installment of the Harry Potter (movie) saga, I’d like to turn to the subject of Harry as Christ. Let us examine the concept of the support of the believers, the symbolic community, more closely. Of course, first we must take a detour through (who else?) Žižek. Please forgive the perhaps excessive length of the following quote!

In Metastases of Enjoyment, pages 39-42, he outlines Hegel’s examination of Christianity:

the ‘death of God’ designates for Hegel the death of the transcendent Beyond that exists in itself: the outcome of this death is God qua Holy Spirit – that is, the product of the labour of the community of believers. The relationship between cause and effect is dialectically reflected here. On the one hand, the Cause is unambiguously the product of the subjects’ activity; it is ‘alive’ only in so far as it is continually resuscitated by the believers’ passion….

On the other hand, these same believers experience the Cause as the Absolute, as what sets their lives in motion…Subjects therefore posit the Cause, yet they posit it not as something subordinated to them but as their absolute Cause. What we encounter here is again the paradoxical temporal loop of the subject: the Cause is posited, but it is posited as what it ‘always-already was.’….

[Christianity] involves the absolute mediation of both sides in the person of Christ, who is simultaneously the representative of God among human subjects and the subject who passes into God. In Christianity, the only identity of man and God is the identity in Christ – in clear contrast to the pre-Christian attitude, which conceives of such an identity as the asymptotic point of man’s infinite approach to God by means of his spiritual purification [e.g., paganism, the great Eastern religions, Judaism, etc., in which God is a mystical ‘Beyond’ that can be approached but never reached]….

[The content of Christian Doctrine is the death that happens to a particular individual who achieves reconciliation with the universal]. Here the death of Christ is “still experienced as the force of negativity that affects a particular, finite being; it is not yet experienced as the simultaneous death of the abstract Beyond itself….

[The content of Christian Faith, however, is] salvation, accomplished by Christ when he took upon himself the sins of humanity and expired on the Cross as a common mortal – salvation thus involves the identity of man and God. This identity, which in the Doctrine was a mere object of knowledge, occurs in Faith as an existential experience….How do I, a finite mortal, concretely experience my identity with God? I experience it in my own radical despair, which – paradoxically – involves a loss of faith: when, apparently forsaken by God, I am driven to despair, thrown into absolute solitude, I can identify with Christ on the Cross (‘Father, why has Thou forsaken me?’)….[M]y personal experience of being abandoned by God thus overlaps with the despair of Christ himself as being abandoned by the divine Father….

What expires on the Cross is thus not only the terrestrial representative of God (as it still seemed in the first syllogism of the Doctrine) but God himself, namely the god of Beyond, God as the transcendent Substance, as the divine Reason which guarantees that our lives have Meaning….

The content of the Ritual, finally, is the Holy Spirit as the positive unity of man and God: the God who expired on the Cross is resurrected in the guise of the Spirit of the religious community. He is no longer the Father who, safe in His Beyond, regulates our fate, but the work of us all, members of the community, since he is present in the ritual performed by us….

Conceived this way, the ‘death of God’ can no longer appear as a liberating experience, as the retreat of the Beyond which sets man free, opening up to him the domain of terrestrial activity as the field in which he is to affirm his creative subjectivity; instead the ‘death of God’ involves the loss of the consistent ‘terrestrial’ reality itself. Farm from heralding the triumph of man’s autonomous creative capacity, the ‘death of God’ is more akin to what the great texts of mysticism usually designate as the ‘night of the world’: the dissolution of (symbolically constituted) reality.

In the Christian faith, Christ’s resurrection is the resurrection and continuation of the principles that Jesus stood for, not of Jesus himself. But in the final stage of the Harry Potter saga, Harry must literally be brought back to life.

So the most unfortunate aspect of the movie is that, instead of exemplifying the triumph of the revolutionary Cause (Good vs. Evil), with the transmission of the Cause to the Holy Spirit, sustained through the ritual action of the community of believers, the plot takes the shallow turn of Harry’s actual, corporeal ‘resurrection.’

Worse still is that this resurrection requires a magical/mystical supplement; the community doesn’t have any part in Harry’s resurrection – the magic of the Resurrection Stone is a kind of ‘deus ex machina’ that relieves the community of its own, existential despair, and of the hard work of keeping the Idea/Cause alive, taking away the most fundamental sacrifice of any revolutionary/religious commitment.

If Harry had died, we wouldn’t have the cop-out happy ending. Rather, we’d have utter despair within the community of believers. Harry’s death could then symbolize for the community the fragility of their own way of life, the non-assurance of their safety in the world, even, yes, the possibility that they will die (literally or figuratively), forsaken by what they’d thought was a secure life, held in tact by an everlasting guide/father figure (Dumbledore).

So while we do get the death of Dumbledore, who stands for the God of the Old Testament, the father figure for Harry and the rest of Hogwarts, the movie never runs its full course; the New Testament and its hero, Jesus Christ, with his Good News — the news of the community’s salvation in their own, collectively sustained (and never guaranteed) belief system — never arrives!

Harry never made the ultimate sacrifice for the community, thus sabotaging the birth of the Holy Spirit.

In a sense, Harry, since he somehow comes back from the dead, becomes, for all intents and purposes, a new Dumbledore. So this moment of ‘ressurection’ is not a moment of triumph, but, rather the ultimate failure of the series’ guiding force.

Rather than accomplishing the radical gesture of faith, Harry’s survival signals the series’ regression toward a kind of pre-Voldemort world.

For a contemporary analogy, this is the same kind of regression into premodern beliefs that’s been frighteningly successful among Christian fundamentalist groups. These groups search for material evidence of the Bible’s authenticity. They want hard evidence, proof. They take the Bible literally, as if the Bible’s literal meaning were even half as important as its existential meaning.

When Harry survives, the community’s freedom dies. Instead of the ‘death of God,’ in other words, we get the opposite, the reassurance that there really is a God: Magic.

Thus instead of accomplishing the radical gesture of Christian faith, the Harry Potter sage ends with a regression into the myth of the God as a mystical, metaphysical Beyond that one can’t ever fully grasp, but which nevertheless has enormous consequences for human life. Even the best wizards can only approach ‘asymptotically,’ as it were, the possession of the ultimate, universal power of Magic.

This is why Christians might rightly oppose J. K. Rowling’s remarkably successful franchise. But not for the cliche, stupid obsession with magic as some kind of metaphysical alternative to the ‘real’ world as ostensibly posited by the Bible, the obsession with Harry Potter as some kind of anti-Christian evil. Rather, Christians should remark that the message of Harry Potter doesn’t offer half the ‘good news’ of the Bible. (But it’s still a lot of fun to read. And damn, what a great movie! Five stars).

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First, before reading further in my comment I’d point you to my comment on the previous post.

I think we may disagree here, though perhaps its merely a difference of perspective. I think that the HP series may represent a better understanding of how the community functions. I think I’d like to say that in the end Harry loses. He sacrifices everything, not merely his death but his symbolic status as a signifier. But the point I’d like to make is that perhaps Christ failed to fail appropriately here. Harry ends with the understanding that power is material and present while Christ seeks to set power off, as other. The message we miss in the Bible is the material message (though it does come through at rare points it is missing in the larger message) that all of society and personality is founded in power.

I really like your point. In this post I wasn’t focused on the wand, although I knew that the wand had a large significance for the meaning. I guess what I was disappointed with, as regards Harry’s snapping of the wand, was that this gesture seemed to me to indicate that ‘all is good and well’ now that the wand is broken — in other words, it’s again as if we lapse into a ‘pre-Voldemort’ world in which, now that the Elder Wand is broken, power as such is eliminated.

But I like the thought that perhaps when Harry breaks the wand he’s making the ultimate sacrifice, in the sense that he’s relinquishing his would-be symbolic status/power in order to save the others from the harm that it might bring.

I also like the idea that he sacrifices his standing as a signifier, if by signifier we mean the ‘thing that’s in me more than myself,’ the ‘objet a’ or ‘agalma’ that the community asserts as the ‘real me.’ I say that because it’s certainly true that others expected to become, and even saw him contemporaneously as *the* new power, their only hope, and so, he could have chosen, as I think you implied earlier, to be another Dumbledore (if we use Dumbledore = elitism/liberalism), and yet by snapping the wand perhaps he’s indicated quite clearly (and ‘materially,’ too) that democracy is the order of the day, for now: maybe Harry is the first to assert that democractic authority is based upon the “paradoxical qualification that is an absence of qualification.”

This post, as well as the previous one about repression, together represent clearly why I feel conflicted about psychoanalysis right now. The Will/Zizek thesis is, in both cases, an argument to make way for faith. On the one hand, the mandate to indulge is clearly faithless, on the other hand, the existence of a “transcendental substance” is equally faithless. The response is the Zizekian notion, by way of Kierkegaardian anxiety, he claims that Christianity and modernity are really allies, both embrace the paradoxical move to simultaneously uproot tradition and secure identity. Formerly, identity came by way of tradition, but now this modern, post-pagan, symbolic grid is autonomous, and so it faces the problem of legitimating authority AND accounting for that legitimacy. The result is this paradoxical capital C Cause, the Kierkegaardian Truth that one chooses because one has already been chosen.
The trouble is, I both love and hate Zizek’s method of taking antinomies and colliding them together to form… something that I can both hate and love. Now I need to take the points one by one.

The thesis in the previous post is that the superego injuction to enjoy makes it such that, the Id is the Superego. Ok, but gravity does not easily reverse direction. The Id is defined by what is repressed by the Superego. The way that the illegal is often alluring, the Id is formed by a normative supression of some kind. Once the Id is the norm, then there is no Id!

The thesis in this post is that the figure of Christ actually already embodies the supreme distance of God, the silent God that is not in a Divine Beyond, but in the hearts of the faithful and their concrete community. I think this is a very generous reading of Christianity, but supposing that one takes this to be an integral part of Christian faith, Zizek still has one logical loophole to account for.Zizek performs rhetorical transubstantiation to turn the resurrection of Christ into the death of God, and the “the death of God,” into a right-wing “If we lose our faith we will lose our grip on reality, hold on to yer values” moment.

I stand by Kojeve’s reading of Hegel, not Zizek’s. The moment of atheism is THE moment of modernity, and I see religion to be part of the mythomagical pre-modern world described by Habermas. I mean seriously? Is Zizek going to start defending miracles? I will be both intrigued, because I love “question everything” approaches, and sad, because soon we will be in the Creationism funhouse, scared of Muslims because their prophet arrived after Christ, and cruel toward Jews because their prophet came before Christ. (Ok, maybe I too am getting a little reactionary and stepping onto a slippery slope…)

Excellent comment. I sympathize, more than you may have expected. Perhaps in order to respond with some sense to your comment, I should begin reading Kojeve?

But then I do wonder, why is psychoanalysis problematic in light of these theoretical explorations undertaken by Zizek and others? It seems to me that, despite Zizek’s possible intentions, psychoanalysis as a practice — and even as a theory — is well safeguarded from ideological-religious associations. Zizek only shows us one arm of the theory, an arm which is already stretched fairly then as it crosses from psychoanalysis to philosophy to politics.

Also, maybe it’s time for me to stop explicitly stating, with would-be ironic ‘wit,’ things like ‘Of course, we must take a detour through (who else?) Žižek.’ After all, the properly Zizekean thing to do would be to just shut up and start read other people.

You take the modus ponens, I’ll take the modus tollens. Where I agree with Zizek on this particular point is that radical, Absolute knowledge is conceivable. We do not approach Truth asymptotically, as most philosophies of science conceive it, resigned to the drudgery of an infinite progress, rather, we arrive at Truth through a paradoxical positing of the presuppositions, the Hegelian gesture that appeals to no philosophical foundation that cannot give an account of itself.

For example, there is no “pre-history” “meta-history” or uninterpreted “fact” of history; history admits itself as being likewise a historical process. This accomplishes the task of eradicating a Beyond, “outside,” or naive objectivity upon which we can base claims. Instead, we must appeal to an Absolute that is, as Zizek clearly and passionately says again and again, caught in the vicious circle of subjectivity. We create the Absolute without precedent, freely, and yet we create “what always already was.”

While I like Latolian the notion of reading Jesus to be the identity of man and God, and furthermore, the notion of identifying with Jesus so that one might identify with the Universal, the ubiquitous suffering of humanity; I do not like Zizek’s monotheistic tack and would prefer a more Unitarian approach. Why not glean the notion of the radical identification with an Other from Feminism, Nationalism, or Islam? I don’t see any reason to think that the figure of Christ is the only World-Savior.

Having never read Kojeve first hand I have to ask this question. Can’t Zizek grant Kojeve that atheism’s desire for (scientific) knowledge is analogous to the moment of modernity with its core values formed during the enlightenment and then claim that modernity’s close minded insistence on scientific truth is founded only on itself? Are the 2 theses really mutually exclusive or can both modernism and post-modernism coexist as understandings?

Certainly modernism and postmodernism can co-exist. Following Pippin’s thesis in “Modernism as a Philosophical Problem,” post-modernism is really just an extension of the modern critique. It is not possible to go “pre-modern” after the Kantian turn. Modernism, like Capitalism (more on that later), is an unending revolution, the philosophical movement that has become its own becoming.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that atheism is a different beast from a modernist’s perspective than from a postmodernists. For a modernist it is a supremely rational worldview, for the postmodernist it is just as contingent as any theism. And if we can see atheism (and by extension theism) in these different ways then Zizek’s claims based on a contingent christianity are not really central to his work. It isn’t that he derives truth from them, but that he finds truth in them only after the fact. Does that make more sense?

I don’t think Zizek is fighting a battle against theism, or against atheism for that matter. Religion is certainly one of the fields of struggle, ideologically speaking, for Zizek et al. However, Zizek isn’t trying to make a point about why or why not God exists, etc. I bet he would see the perennial ‘debate’ about God’s existence, and the other fights between theists and atheists, as a ridiculous distraction from the truth of the matter. He would accept atheism as the only way. But his fight is not against theists; his assumption is that theism is impossible today (sure, people believe it, but so much for that), and that any debate concerning Christianity should very quickly move away from questions of any ‘actual’ metaphysics.

Zizek is not saying that Christianity is merely a contingent moment. Christianity provides the universal framework for understanding psychoanalysis as a praxis for the development of sociopolitical causes. With regard to JJ’s point — ‘Why not Nationalism, Feminism, or Islam?” — the radical identification with an Other is not the identification with one particular other, but, rather, the identification with the Other-ness of any worldview as a whole. What this means is that the Other-centered message of Christianity — precisely, Love and Forgiveness as outside the realm of the Law, but also outside the vicious loop of Law and its Transgression/superego supplement — is precisely that we posit the presuppositions, as JJ said. In this way it is a postmodern theology; a way to conceive categories like Law, Sin, Nation, and Other within the coordinates of a psychoanalytic critique of society, that is, the coordinates of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.

What I’ve come to realize is that Zizek reads *everything* through a psychoanalytic lens.